Covering the convergence of conflict, intelligence, and technology since 2002.

About John Little

John Little has been covering national security, intelligence, and technology issues at Blogs of War since 2002. His work and analysis has been featured on the BBC, CBC, ABC, PBS Newshour, Fast Company, CBS, CNN and other international media outlets. The Blogs of War Twitter feed, @Blogsofwar, was selected as one of the top Twitter accounts of 2014 by Time magazine.

DIA Director Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn Shares His Thoughts on Threats, Opportunities, and 33 Years of Service

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn has had a long and distinguished intelligence career. His bio-sketch could easily run longer than this interview. His relentless, no-nonsense approach to innovation, an approach that at times cost him political capital, is well-known. However, that same drive and willingness to take risks also propelled him into his current role as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. His critics can point to a rocky tenure at DIA but they will have missed the point. Flynn chose his battles, fought them with integrity, and rose to the top of his profession. He sought profound change and constant improvement in environments known for resisting both. It has been incredibly interesting to watch it all unfold from the sidelines. I am deeply appreciative of his willingness to speak to Blogs of War readers directly.

John Little: Jihadist movements are expanding. Terrorist attacks, while mostly regional, also continue to rise. Looking at these trends, looking at the explosive success of groups such as ISIS (now the Islamic State), and looking at the ongoing destabilization of the Middle East and Africa how would you describe the United States’ current position in this conflict?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: I would say that the scale of threats that we face around the world are unprecedented, certainly in my 30-plus years of being an intelligence officer, and I think what we face in the years ahead will be even more staggering.

However, I think that our ability to be able to monitor and manage strategic surprise actually has been pretty good, not great, but I would tell you that we have a dedicated workforce of men and women that are on 24/7, 365 days a year, protecting the United States from these threats.

Still, in the Middle East there will always be best-case scenarios and worst-case scenarios. Honestly, I can’t sit here today and tell you that there are any really good scenarios especially for Syria or Iraq. I believe that we are in a period where options are becoming fewer and fewer and I think the longer that we wait the cost of those options certainly increases. It increases financially, it increases in terms of human lives, and the risk to peace in the Middle East certainly increases.

What the United States has to do is work with our international partners to shape the outcome of these events into what is in the best interests of the region, and for our regional allies and partners. We have to shape it so they’re secure in their own ability to continue to contribute to greater good of the region. Our international partnerships are key to this process.

John Little: The U.S. intelligence, special forces, and law enforcement communities have developed successful strategies for knocking jihadists down on the battlefield but at times we seem to lack the deep strategic understanding that would come from significant human intelligence programs. Is there broad understanding at the policy and intelligence community leadership level that human intelligence is lacking or that we need to do more to better understand our enemies?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: The Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Intelligence Community as a whole, has men and women all over the world working every day to understand exactly what is happening on the ground. We provide strategic warning; some strategic space to begin to think about the likely scenarios that the United States will be facing – political scenarios, economic scenarios, military scenarios.

We do pretty well with strategic warning. Tactical warning–exact timing, specific places-is much more difficult. Our enemies frankly don’t want us to know those things. In the intelligence community we work to forecast what is likely to happen. We have to be right all the time, every time; sometimes it’s very difficult.

John Little: Recent betrayals by contractors and military personnel have exposed significant intelligence programs. The vulnerabilities inherent in phone and internet communications have never been more widely understood by your targets. Are we seeing signs that groups like the Islamic State are benefiting from these disclosures and does this also underscore the need for enhancing our human intelligence capabilities?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: It is absolutely essential to maintain a diverse, highly agile
human intelligence capability in any case given the number of conflicts and hotspots we’re going to continue to deal with into the foreseeable future. In terms of maintaining a capability that is diverse, we need a multitude of people from different backgrounds, who speak different languages, and understand the cultures in areas where the conditions are set for potential conflict. So really, this is something we need regardless of the exposure of other intelligence programs.

John Little: You have championed integration and broader sharing of information inside the intelligence community. While there is no doubt that breaking down silos can enhance analysis, the integration of networks and data stores seems to have vastly eased collection for insider threats such as Edward Snowden. Is the intelligence community going to seriously re-think the technical architectures and security models at the heart of its networks in an effort to balance effectiveness and security?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: Data security is a problem everywhere these days–not just in the IC. So I think we need to all rethink it in terms of who needs what and monitoring. That said, there is no turning back on breaking down silos and integrating both people and information. This is becoming even more critical due to the sheer growth of data, as our people are facing the prospects of not having the time or tools to go through it all. So despite the inherent risks that come with it, we’re going to continue focusing on making the right data available to the right people at the right time. Integration is the cornerstone of this strategy. To do otherwise would mean for us to be irrelevant in the 21st Century.

John Little: Prior to the rise of Wikileaks, and disclosures by people like Edward Snowden, the U.S. intelligence community seemed to be making significant progress in winning the hearts and minds of hackers. Much of that progress has been lost thanks to these events. How does the intelligence community win back a much needed resource and how can it win back the trust of the general public it protects?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: Unfortunately, trust of the US intelligence community has ebbed and flowed throughout its history. All I ask is for the American people–and people everywhere–to remember what the U.S. intelligence community spends most of its time on: providing intelligence to policymakers so they can make key decisions. We do strategic warning. While it is much easier to see when the U.S. IC fails to spot a problem in advance, it is much more difficult to see all of the work we do on a daily basis to inform U.S. leaders from the Secretary of Defense through the President. We spend a lot of our time identifying where the conditions for conflict and instability are occurring and in turn warning our leaders. That strategic warning then enables them to pick up the phone, call foreign leaders, and work to broker peace.

John Little: You famously advocated for intelligence community innovation in your 2010 white paper Fixing Intel: A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan. Following the report you were catapulted into a senior leadership role that, on paper at least, seemed to be a platform that would allow you to implement your vision. But innovation in a bureaucracy is difficult (whatever your title) and your time at DIA has been challenging. As your time at the agency winds down where do you feel that you made the most progress? How would you characterize your tenure?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn: Coming into the agency, I was given two objectives, if you will. The first was dealing with skyrocketing intelligence requirements with an increasing scale of threats to cover. The second was facing a fiscal crisis in the coming years ahead. Given those two conditions, DIA needed to take a hard look at how it incorporates what we have learned in the last 10-plus years of war inside of DIA in order to make it more operationally focused and more capable given significant reductions, and reductions that we actually have taken in the last couple years.

So the biggest thing for me was to try to the key lessons that we learned from the last decade and incorporate them in how we are organized and how we operate. I would say the number one success is integrating our capabilities out in the battlefield, and we created fusion cells that integrated operations and intelligence elements. We created interagency task forces that brought together multiple organizations and agencies from across the U.S. government and made them to work together, and it succeeded.

So what we’ve done in DIA is to create these conditions inside of DIA by forming integrated centers that are inside of our organization that then reach out to the 11 four-star commands that we support around the world, our combatant commands. The integration inside of DIA and then externally integrating with our combatant commands, our supported war fighters, was really important, and I think that’s probably the single biggest initiative that we took on, and the most successful.

John Little: Lastly, what is on the agenda for you personally and professionally after DIA?

Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn:: I’m at a place where I feel very good about the 33 years that I’ve served, five of the last ten in combat, and I feel really good about where the Defense Intelligence Agency is in right now. I think it’s very well-postured for the future, and we have a highly skilled workforce and even better talent that will come in behind me.

As for me, I don’t know yet and that’s part of the excitement, I think. It’s part of the uncertainty. You know, we’ve been dealing with uncertainty for a long time, and certainly in my career, uncertain environments that I’ve had to deploy to, uncertain periods of time when I’ve been apart from my family. So we’re going to be together a lot more. We’ll make some decisions here in the next couple months, but I do want to continue to contribute to the national security of the United States.

Still, most importantly, I’m going to focus on my family. It’s a vital part of what I’ve done over the years and who I am as a person. I cannot thank them enough for their sacrifice and the love they’ve shown me over the years.